Robert McKee's book 'Story' has a wondrous second part to the poem. I look up it to whenever hit with this dilemma.
(First, a retelling of the original)
> High above the forest floor, a millipede strolled along the branch of a tree, her thousand pairs of legs swinging in an easy gait. From the tree top, song birds looked down, fascinated by the synchronization of the millipede's stride. “That's an amazing talent,” chirped
the songbirds. “You have more limbs than we can count. How do you do it?” And for the first time in her life the millipede thought about this. “Yes,” she wondered, “how do I do what I do?” As she turned to look back, her bristling legs suddenly ran into one another and tangled like vines of ivy. The songbirds laughed as the millipede, in a panic of confusion, twisted herself into a knot and fell to the earth below.
(The second part)
> On the forest floor, the millipede, realizing that only her pride was hurt, slowly, carefully, limb by limb, unraveled herself. With patience and hard work, she studied and flexed and tested her appendages, until she was able to stand and walk. What was once instinct became knowledge. She realized she didn’t have to move at her old, slow, rote pace. She could amble, strut, prance, even run and jump. Then, as never before, she listened to the symphony of the songbirds and let music touch her heart. Now in perfect command of thousands of talented legs, she gathered courage and, with a style of her own, danced and danced a dazzling dance that astonished all the creatures of her world.
When I think about my master password while typing it, I sometimes get it wrong. When I don't think about it, it's always right.
Judging from the bibliography of the wiki page, there doesn't seem to be much (recent) research into the effect. I'd love to know more about the nature of these (automatic) neural "highways" and why conscious thought can't reliably interact with them the way it can with the regular pathways.
A long time ago, I had a server in a datacenter, that I couldn't log into remotely...I had to be standing in front of the KVM to type the password correctly. Geolocational muscle memory.
I've had a password on an SSH key I used like every day for years until it was entirely in muscle memory. Then one day I just... stopped being able to type it, couldn't remember anything about it all
I used to use a password that had a number, and then SHIFT+number to get the special character on the number’s keyboard key. When I’d use a virtual keyboard that didn’t map the key to that special character, I couldn’t remember the password until I looked up a picture of a keyboard with a US layout.
What throws me is using a different keyboard and a password sounding different. I’m sure I’ve typed it in correctly, by my other senses are firing that something is amiss.
I've got a context-dependent skill. I can type on two different keyboard layouts. If it is one of my computers my brain switches to a different mode than when it some other computer. It fails when when some other computer uses my layout.
I don't know my password at all. I remember it in terms of finger movements.
There is this piece of hacker lore, where a person discovered that he could not log in into a machine when standing. As soon as he sat, the login worked. After checking whether he is not standing on the keyboard cable etc., he discovered that the keyboard had two keycaps swapped. When he was standing, he needed to look at the keyboard and wrote the password incorrectly. When sitting, the muscle memory was working, ignoring the wrong keycaps.
Yeah I can't actually remember my Ebanking contract number, which I use to login. It's only when I'm looking at the desktop version of the login page that I can retrieve it from memory.
I’m a beginner at piano and it’s amazing to me that I can play an entire piece UNLESS I look at my fingers. The moment I do the entire thing goes straight off the rails.
I also cannot resume at any location but only at specific “keyframes.”
Something similar happens in archery. There are people that aim and aim a lot. Think Olympic archers.
The there's instinctive shooting style where you just basically look at what you want to hit and muscle memory does the rest. It's amazing how accurate this can be.
I do this with bowling. I can only shoot instinctively. If I try to look and aim at a spot marking on the lane, or try to control my shoulder and wrist during the swing to control the hook, I'm all over the place. If I just look at the pins and let muscle memory do the work, I hit the pocket much more consistently.
I definitely know what you're talking about! This means you're developing strong muscle memory, which is good -- but having too much dependence on muscle memory is something to watch out for. It's dangerous because:
- Muscle memory is extremely transient; it starts to fade a bit after just a day or two of not practicing one specific piece, and drops off extremely quickly the longer you go.
- Your sense of timing in muscle memory is based on how long it takes for you to physically move your fingers, rather than on the rhythm of the piece. This means that as your muscle memory gets better and better, you unconsciously and inconsistently speed up, causing you to actually become worse at maintaining a steady tempo.
- Muscle memory immortalizes bad technique/"shortcuts" that you took early on in learning the piece. This can cause sloppy playing; inconsistent ability to nail tricky sections; an inability to push the piece beyond a certain tempo; or even repetitive strain injury.
- As you observed, your muscle memory can't get you back on track if you get disrupted.
- Muscle memory doesn't work when you're playing with other people, because you need to be able to consciously adapt your playing to your bandmates.
- You can't improvise/transpose/adapt your playing on-the-fly when relying solely on muscle memory.
- Muscle memory will randomly fail you at the most inopportune times, especially when you're nervous. It's no fun to suddenly forget all your music whenever you try to play in front of people!
My piano teacher taught me a variety of practice techniques designed to disrupt muscle memory; to force me to be able to play a piece because I know it in my mind and not just in my fingers. For example:
- Metronome! Lots and lots of metronome practice. Putting it on the metronome trains you to play to the pulse of the piece, and playing at a variety of speeds disrupts muscle memory because of how timing-dependent muscle memory is. My teacher recommended starting each practice session by playing each piece half-speed on the metronome, and repeating a few times at increasing speeds until reaching my desired tempo.
- Practicing in "rhythms": play a section (with just one hand), pausing briefly after every other note. Then play it again, but pause after the other notes this time. For me, this does wonders for tricky scale-like runs, because those little pauses force me to consider each transition between notes.
- "Backwards practice": play the last measure of a section, then play the two last measures, then the three last measures, etc. This is remarkably effective for me, especially in learning how to resume playing the piece anywhere rather than just at specific spots (which is really important for being able to smoothly recover from mistakes).
All of these practice techniques are infuriating, because suddenly really easy stuff you can play in your sleep is hard! But the goal is to reach a point where you have comfortable muscle memory, and are able to play without thinking too hard about it -- but you also have the "head knowledge" to keep you on track, and to fall back on when your muscle memory suddenly fails you.
I’m in the process of getting my masters at a conservatory, and you’ve just given me a lightbulb moment in understanding why my playing is sometimes inconsistent (muscle memory) and what is happening when I move beyond that (mindful playing). Very very valuable, thank you for sharing!
Most of these bullet points sound like parametrized muscle memory. More flexible and adjusted to inputs from the outside, but the output information still being encoded in finger movements.
Practicing a piece to perfection or at least a presentable quality might be good for motivation. But for long term improvement my guess is that the time needed for that would better be spent on sight reading, by ear, or technique. Reducing the time to learn some piece later.
Might cause confusing chats: I've been practicing X for Y years -- can you play something? -- actually, not really.
I played for 6-7 years (maybe more, this was a long time ago) as a kid and I'd like to think I was pretty decent. This happened to me too. Part of it was a kind of mindless practice that wasn't particularly intentional, so I'd get pretty good at ripping through a piece but I wasn't thinking about it.
A while ago one of my friends mentioned to me that they don't actively remember their eurocheque card security code, but they can enter it automatically, without thinking.
That made me think about my security code and I also couldn't remember! But the thought tripped me up so much, that I couldn't let it go and the next time I had to withdraw some cash, I didn't know what to put in. I actually had to return my card and get a new one a few days later. Now I make a conscious effort to think about what I am entering.
I almost forgot my Android unlock pattern once. The phone rebooted while I was sleeping, and I was still a bit groggy when I tried to unlock it. Perhaps I fat fingered my first attempt, but then I suddenly couldn't remember what the pattern was. Fortunately I got it working on the last attempt before the phone would factory reset. As I was traveling at the time, that would have been a small disaster. Never would I have thought that this could be happening.
I put my credit card PINs and my Android pattern in my password manager after that. Still makes me wonder how I would access my secrets if I were to forget the thing I enter several times a day, every day.
In the book “The Inner Game of Tennis” the author Gallwey suggests complementing your opponent on a certain technique if you want to see it immediately worsen. E.g. “wow your backhand is really coming along” if their backhand is killing you, then they’ll start thinking about it and it’ll get worse.
This is an interesting read. I'm a programmer by trade. It's easier for me to code a feature than to actually design it or to document it. At the same time I amazed at how easy it is for some of my colleagues to write the documentation for features I built.
I once came across a word for this phenomenon, but can't find it again. It's most common in children (as with similar autonomic system phenomena, like lucid dreaming and sleep walking), and it correlates with anxiety and OCD later in life.
The irony in the name of course is that it couldn't possibly happen to an actual centipede, as they don't have anything like the high level of conscious thought that humans do. But I'm curious whether this phenomenon could occur in any other species, and how we'd ever know.
Sadly so far there's no evidence to back up Douglas Adams' theory that we're all able to fly if we could stop ourselves thinking about how we're clearly not biologically capable of it and would injure or kill ourselves hitting the ground if we tried.
This is a strong theme in "The inner game of tennis". The author even jokingly mentions that when you are losing a friendly game you can turn it around by honestly complementing the good element in opponent's game ("your backhand is quite precise today!").
It’s also the reason that flow states cannot be interrupted, even for short breaks, otherwise the entire mental state collapses and cannot be restored for hours, days, or sometimes weeks. This was recently discussed as one of the barriers to returning to the office from remote work due to the various kinds of interruptions one can encounter in an office-like environment. Still, others have taken the opposite position, saying they can engage in flow states easier in the office than the home. This kind of interruption recently happened to me and I had to stop working on a specific subject for about four days until I was able to recapture the flow state and return to it. Once you get in the zone, you’re there, and that’s that.
My experience with Poker is that there are three strategies which beginners can easily perform: always fold, always go all-in, play randomly. These are all sub-optimal strategies but they tend to be relatively successful compared to all but the greatest players.
To relate this to the article, it seems like unless you're really good at "consciously" playing poker, then playing thoughtlessly (like the centipede) is probably your best bet and how you often see beginners stitching up all but the real masters.
This is interesting but not the same concept at all. Randomness is not what is being talked about it's about having competence which is impeded by consciously thinking about it.
I suppose if it were a tournament you might go out relatively late, or later than you would as a complete amateur, just because it would take you a little while to be worn away by the blinds.
It must be really cool to be able to do most basic tasks well without thinking about it. I still get funny looks in public if I'm not paying careful attention to how I'm walking.
On the other hand, high levels of competence has the downside of usually being really surprised when you do make a mistake, especially on something you didn't even think was a task a person might need to be careful with.
It might be possible to analyze insurence data for damage cause when parking depending on the distance traveled before. First few pages of google results didn't provide any, unfortunately.
Whenever I shoot pool, I play really well in the middle of the evening, never at the start or end. It's just the right amount of inebriation to not think but still execute.
That's interesting and maybe it is related somehow but I don't think it's what the parent is describing. In my own example - I play a certain sport but my best game I ever played - I hadn't slept for two nights from working on a deadline - went to a game and scored 5 goals and the whole thing was amazing. But I can guarantee that I never learned to play my sport while in that state of sleep deprivation. It was just something about that state that allowed me to execute at a continuous high level. I believe that inebriation can have similar effect.
Based on their comment, I was presuming (perhaps wrongly) that they played pool at a bar, and so their skill would have developed in the presence of some form of alcohol.
State-dependent memory isn't the only factor, though. Things like relaxation could well have an even larger impact.
State-dependent memory is fascinating and likely a factor. I don't play all that much pool and not always in similar conditions (e.g. game room in condo). I can relate another time I had unexpected good performance playing Halo (a rare activity for me) while socializing. For the mid portion of the evening, I was an extremely good sniper getting top scores that I never usually do. Being a one-off case, it's uncertain but I'd say that being relaxed and not thinking about it at all to be a necessary but not sufficient factor.
These times feels almost like beginners luck when you barely have any context and just trying things--like hitting that tiny bonus target while axe throwing for the first time as a hail mary, 'why not go for it?' shot.
NB: Poetry for Physicists doesn't exist. Physicists apparently are fonts of general knowledge who can learn, nay, MASTER, any topic in full without a special one-semester class. This is satirized in the Sheldon Cooper character.
(First, a retelling of the original)
> High above the forest floor, a millipede strolled along the branch of a tree, her thousand pairs of legs swinging in an easy gait. From the tree top, song birds looked down, fascinated by the synchronization of the millipede's stride. “That's an amazing talent,” chirped the songbirds. “You have more limbs than we can count. How do you do it?” And for the first time in her life the millipede thought about this. “Yes,” she wondered, “how do I do what I do?” As she turned to look back, her bristling legs suddenly ran into one another and tangled like vines of ivy. The songbirds laughed as the millipede, in a panic of confusion, twisted herself into a knot and fell to the earth below.
(The second part)
> On the forest floor, the millipede, realizing that only her pride was hurt, slowly, carefully, limb by limb, unraveled herself. With patience and hard work, she studied and flexed and tested her appendages, until she was able to stand and walk. What was once instinct became knowledge. She realized she didn’t have to move at her old, slow, rote pace. She could amble, strut, prance, even run and jump. Then, as never before, she listened to the symphony of the songbirds and let music touch her heart. Now in perfect command of thousands of talented legs, she gathered courage and, with a style of her own, danced and danced a dazzling dance that astonished all the creatures of her world.